Amazon Microsoft Cisco Swoop In On$24 Billion India Farm-data Trove

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Amazon Microsoft Cisco Swoop In On$24 Billion India Farm-data Trove
06 Feb 2023
7 min read

News Synopsis

Latest Updated on 06 February 2023

Technology monoliths like Amazon.com, Microsoft, and Cisco Systems are lined up to use data from Indian farmers as part of a government-led productivity drive that seeks to revamp the stale agricultural sector.

In order to share farm statistics it has collected since taking office in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's administration which is working to ensure food security in the country with the second-highest population in the world has signed preliminary agreements with the three American giants and a slew of local businesses starting in April. Modi is putting his trust in the private sector to assist farmers in higher yields via tools and applications developed using data on crop output, soil quality, and land holdings.

The government said this week that local giants like Jio Platforms Ltd. the business run by Reliance Industries Ltd. owned by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, and tobacco giant ITC Ltd. have signed up for the program.

Modi believes that the project would bring about long past-due changes in the farming industry, which employs over half of the 1.3 billion people in the country and makes up about a fifth of the third-largest economy in Asia.

With infrastructure investment, the government has promised to minimize some of the greatest food waste in the world, improve rural incomes, reduce imports, and eventually compete with exporters like Brazil, the United States, and the European Union.

For multinational corporations, it's a shot at India's agritech sector, which Ernst & Young estimates may generate about $24 billion in sales by 2025 despite having a current penetration of just 1%. It's an opportunity to use networks, AI, and machine learning in a developing nation. For e-commerce companies like Amazon and Reliance, securing a consistent supply of farm products could help them break into the Indian Food Market which accounts for more than half of the country's $1 trillion in annual retail spending.

Last Updated on 17 September 2021

Microsoft, Cisco, and Amazon are just a handful of the digital behemoths fighting for access to data from Indian farmers. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government is trying to achieve food security in India, the second country in the population index. Modi is putting his confidence in the private sector to help farmers increase yields through the use of data-driven applications and technologies such as crop production. The government expects the project's success to boost rural incomes, reduce imports, and minimize food waste. The goal is to provide customized services for a sector that is dealing with several issues, including peaked harvests, water scarcity, deteriorating soil, and a lack of infrastructure. Local companies like Star Agribazaar Technology, ESRI India Technologies, Baba Ramdev's Patanjali Organic Research Institute, and Ninja-cart have already signed on. It may become increasingly difficult to sell a government technology-to-help-agriculture initiative to farmers. The concert may potentially exacerbate the long-running protests that Modi's administration has been seeking to put down for the past nine months. Apeksha Kaushik the principal analyst at Gartner, believes that India's technology adoption is still in its early stages. ESRI India uses a geographic information system to generate data and create applications. "This is going to change the game," says Star Agribazaar co-founder Amit Mundawala. Last year, Karnataka, a southern Indian state, developed a data-driven system identical to this one. When everything is said and done, the project will form the foundation of a national digital agriculture ecosystem.

TWN Opinion